ABOUT THIS BOOK

Retelling performances, collecting things, reading traces, mapping memories, gaming autobiographies: in European and Anglo-American theater since the turn of the millennium, a range of new nonliterary narrative practices such as these have taken root. Unable to be subsumed under a well-established narratological, dramatic, or postdramatic perspective, they call for a reexamination of the relationship between performance and narration. Performing Stories seeks to reconceptualize narrative against the backdrop of innovative theater formats such as collective storytelling games, theater installations, extensive autobiographical performances, immersive role-playing, and audio-video walks.

Nina Tecklenburg’s focus lies on narration less as literary composition than as sensate, embodied cultural practice—a participatory and open process that fosters social relationships. She gives central importance to the forces of narration that create and undo culture and politics. A foundational new book, Performing Stories presents a groundbreaking transdisciplinary perspective through new approaches that are stimulating to performance studies, narrative and cultural theory, literary criticism, and game and video studies.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Nina Tecklenburg is professor of theater and performance at Bard College Berlin and a performance maker. As a co-deviser, performer, and dramaturge, she has realized projects with Interrobang, Gob Squad, She She Pop, Lone Twin Theatre, Baktruppen, and Rabih Mroué. William Locke Wheeler is a translator and artist living in Berlin.

REVIEWS

"Not only an outstanding research achievement but also a gripping read […], a highly original and innovative theoretical exploration in contemporary theatre studies."—Dr Erika Fischer-Lichte, university professor of theatre research at the Free University of Berlin

Praise for the German original:
"Tecklenburg’s strategy of equal attentiveness to theory and practical examples proves fantastically suitable to the theatrical everyday: her hypotheses and conclusions remain fastened to concrete images, linked to vivid descriptions of performances which in turn form tactile theoretical docking points in the reception of theatrical moments. At the same time, the author offers a comprehensive overview of narrative theory and other forms of scholarship connected to it. [. . .] Performing Stories is hence not only an interesting contribution in terms of scholarship—the first step in the rehabilitation of a (reformed) concept of narration—but is also a perfect accompaniment for the direct experience of theatre narratives."—Anja Redecker, Kritische Ausgabe

Praise for the German original:
"One special merit of the book is how its reassessment of terminology interrogates and dismantles frozen dichotomies that have led foremost to the exclusion of narrative theory from certain fields of scholarship. [. . .] Tecklenburg’s book is a vastly important and long overdue contribution to both contemporary narrative theory and theatre studies."—Elke Huwiler, www.theaterforschung.de

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. PERFORMING STORIES: AN INTRODUCTION

1. Origin Story Number One
2. Historical Contexts
2.1 Illusion, Distance, Presence, Interaction:
Stations of Narrative in Twentieth-Century Theatre
2.2 Wired Narration and Narrative Self-Performance
3. Terminological Foundations
3.1 Narrating: How to Do Things with Stories
3.2 Narrative Performances. Challenging Terminological Presuppositions
4. Protagonists, Plots, Methods

II. (THEORETICAL) SCENES OF NARRATIVE

1. A Walk-In Crime Story (Uwe Mengel)
2. Perspectives from Theatre Studies and Narratology
2.1 Between Drama and Performance: Narration as Deviation and Exclusion
2.2 Between Language and Representation: Narration as Verbal Communication and Arrangement of Incidents
3. Shifting Perspectives: Narrative as Process and Performance
3.1 Plotting, Narrative Knowledge, Narrative Energy.
On the Openness of Narration
3.2 Toward a Dynamic Concept of Narration
3.3 Entanglement, Narration-Action, Transmission.
Narration as Cultural and Social Practice

III. NARRATION GAMES

1. Narrating and Playing
2. Narration as (Language) Game (Wittgenstein)
3. And on the Thousandth Night … :
A Competition (Forced Entertainment)
3.1 Fabula Interrupta: Narrative Desire
3.2 Making a Play for It: The Canon of Stories and Politics of Narration
4. Narrative Self-Legitimization of the Social Bond (Lyotard)
5. Morally Entangled: A Roleplay (SIGNA)
5.1 Games of Trust and Secretiveness: Among Witnesses
5.2 Rumour Mills and Telling Swarms:
On the Power of Flying Narration

IV. STORIED THINGS: (AUTO)BIOGRAPHICAL COLLECTING, TAILORING, CRAFTING

1. How Things Narrate Us: Narrative Cargo
2. A Shambles of (Auto)Biographical Things (Bobby Baker)
2.1 Oneself
2.2 Recalcitrant Things, Story-Mixes and Trying to Self-Cleanse
3. Tailoring Identity (She She Pop)
3.1 Trying on Stories Like Clothes
3.2 The Self-Narrative as Fetish

V. NARRATIVE MOVEMENTS – NARRATIVE SPACES

1. Narrative Walks
2. Reading, Following and Leaving Traces (Janet Cardiff, plan b)
2.1 On the Narrativity of Traces
2.2 Narrivigating the City
3. The Flyneur and narrative Cartography (LIGNA, plan b)
3.1 GPS-Flânerie
3.2 Movement—Narration—Mapping

VI. TELLING EVENTS

1. (Re)Telling Performances
2. Anticipated Nostalgia:
The Performance as Grand Narrative (Lone Twin)
2.1 Event—Narration—Stories
2.2 A Cyclist’s Odyssey: On Anecdotal Heroic Deeds
2.3 Recycling: Communal History and Repeated Ending
3. Narrating Performance Art:
On the (De)Mythologization of the Performance (Boryana Rossa)
3.1 The Myth of the Event, the Myth of the Performance
3.2 Make (No) Graven Images: The Myth of Performance Art
3.3 A Matter of Life and Death: Hidden Narratives of Body Art

VII. CONCLUSION: THE NEW THEATRE OF NARRATION

1. Retelling, Recounting
2. Propositions
2.1 Performance Theory as Narrative Knowledge Praxis
2.2 Towards a Performative Turn in Narratology
2.3 Semiosis and Aisthesis and Their Asymmetrical Entanglement
3. Origin Story Number Two